[p2p-research] Economic Options for Organizing Networks in Beijing

[Michel Bauwens]

Hi Ned:

done here at http://p2pfoundation.net/Nottingham_Peer_Production_Workshop

let me know what I should add as your institutional affiliation as well as
anything other add-ons you may want,

Michel

On Nov 22, 2007 7:24 AM, Ned Rossiter <ned at nedrossiter.org> wrote:

> [here is my paper from the workshop. It really is preliminary - a
> working paper - with heaps of undeveloped points (particularly on
> experimental economics - a lot more to say there) and many disjointed
> paragraphs etc etc. so it goes. Ned]
>
> ---
>
> The Political Economy of Peer Production
> Workshop in Nottingham (UK), 15-16 November 2007
> http://www.ntu.ac.uk/p2pworkshop2007/
>
> Ned Rossiter
>
> 'Economic Options for Organizing Networks in Beijing'
>
> Notwithstanding the commercialisation of the net, the hierarchical
> systems embedded in social-technical infrastructures and dynamics,
> and the impact of national and surpranational government policy on
> network cultures, to what extent can we really speak of a political
> economy of peer-to-peer network practices? If political economy is
> traditionally understood in terms of the role institutions and their
> concomitant interests play in the structuring and regulation of
> economic life, then what might it mean to transpose this axiom to the
> culture of networks? How, in other words, might organized networks as
> nascent institutional forms provide new insights into the political
> economy of peer production? More specifically, how might the social-
> technical properties of organized networks situated within the urban
> and political context of Beijing facilitate new models for
> interventions in local, regional and transnational 'creative
> economies'? What might such activity tell us about the geopolitical
> variations of neoliberal capital? This paper outlines some
> preliminary models of economic sustainability for the OrgNets
> platform and considers the political implications for networks
> cultures that take seriously the problematic of political economy.
>
> It seems to me that a social economy preconditions the possibility of
> a political economy of network cultures. Without a social economy,
> there is no political economy. Indeed, in many instances the social
> economy within p2p networks marginalises or displaces the operative
> force of political economy. Open publishing and bit torrents of
> pirate cinema, software and music are obvious examples that come to
> mind. However, even in these instances of ostensibly 'free
> culture' there lurks in the system a political economy, one that is
> closely connected to infrastructure and info-governance. In a recent
> dialogue with Paul Hartzog, Trebor Scholz frames this tension as
> follows: 'the means of production are available to networked
> publics; these tools and platforms are, however, owned by
> corporations'.[1] Aside from the ever-present potential of unruly
> workers, the trouble so often faced by the owners of infrastructure
> is that they suffer from limited imagination. Without a few tinkerers
> in the shop, capital is left without the invention of difference
> necessary for its renewal. Thus a mutually parasitic relation exists
> between owners and users of the means of production. As we know,
> historically this relation is one of constant oscillation that
> constitutes the force of hegemony. A central interest of this
> workshop is to discern how this relation plays out in the p2p culture
> of networks.
>
> By way of addressing the question of political economy, I wish to
> focus my talk on the social-technical aspects of an experiment in
> transdisciplinary urban-media research in Beijing built around the
> logic of networks. My interest is in the ways in which such social-
> technical endeavours in institution formation might operate as what
> Fabian Muniesa and Michel Callon term 'economic experiments' that
> shape the construction of markets. The communication of relations
> between emergent institutional forms and their invention of markets
> is underscored by the technics of mediation. Mediation, in turn, is
> registed in the following key forms: systems of governance, rituals
> and materialities of practice, discourses with uncertain borders and
> technologies of collaborative constitution. The arrangement of these
> elements produces new territories for potential exploitation by
> capital. The political and economic challenge is to produce
> interventions into markets that enable economic resources for
> experiments in organizing networks and living wages for participants.
> (Due to constraints of time I will not address typologies of
> mediation in this talk.)
>
>
> OrgNets in Beijing
>
>  From May-July this year I coordinated a transciplinary research
> platform that produced a counter-mapping of the creative industries
> in Beijing.[2] In the first instance this project was financed
> through parasitical means, with funds from the research centre that I
> work in enabling participants from Europe, India, Australia and New
> Zealand to collaborate with local researchers and media practioners
> in Beijing. Such a model of financing research is a one-off, and self-
> generating means of funding are required in order to sustain this
> platform as a partially autonomous research network.
>
> By undertaking a collaborative anthropology of new institutional
> forms – what I term 'organized networks' – this project is
> interested in the transdisciplinary dimension of creative industries
> in Beijing. The project is organized around six key vectors of research:
>  migrant networks and service labour; network ecologies of creative
> waste; informational geographies vs. creative clusters; centrality of
> real-estate speculation for creative economies; import cultures and
> export innovations in architecture and urban design; and artist
> villages and market engineering. In migrating media education outside
> of the university, the project recomposes media education as a
> collaborative research process focussed on critique and analysis of
> urban transformations and the politics of creative and service labour.
>
> The project adopted the model of a mobile research laboratory as a
> framework for collaborative research on the creative industries,
> urban transformation and media practice in Beijing. As a laboratory
> the OrgNets project was an assemblage of experimentation and testing,
> one that will continue to develop throughout the next year. And as a
> laboratory, the OrgNet project was excised or temporarily suspended
> from the outside force of the real market. But the mobile and social
> nature of OrgNets makes its borders porous. The distinction between
> inside and outside is not fixed; borders are defined by the continuum
> of change that comes into play with the addition or departure of
> participants, the particularities of urban situations, the topics of
> investigation and the institutions of temporary connection.
>
> As an assemblage whose spatial and temporal coordinates undergo
> constant transformation, the relation between inside and outside is
> subject to processes of translation. It would be a mistake to think
> the range of contingencies – many of which may register
> imperceptably on the action of networks – can ever be brought under
> control. But within the territory of the known, faintly perceived and
> vaguely intuited, it is not unreasonable to suppose an economy is
> possible for networks that, at this stage, are without money.
>
> Given the transdisciplinary orientation of the OrgNets project, the
> prevailing policy discourse of creative industries, the intense
> economic and social changes underway in China and the exotic allure
> the city as urban laboratory holds for intellectural tourists, the
> expanding international market of education is an obvious economy
> awaiting intervention by non-traditional 'providers'. In fact,
> this is already the case for mainstream external providers. As an
> outsourced form of education provision, OrgNets offer established
> institutions of education and research the possibility of value-
> adding at a cost that is going to be cheaper than if these
> institutions hired staff on full benefits whose capacity to invent is
> rapidly dulled by the burden of bureacracy and audit cultures.
>
>
> Experimental Economics and Evidence Machines
>
> The field of experimental economics in its contemporary form emerged
> out of game theory from the late 1940s and early 1950s. Francesco
> Guala notes two distinct approaches within experimental economics –
> theory-testing and institution-building; the former tends toward
> experiments in decision-making, the latter experiments in market
> performativity.[3] Orthodox game theory combines or traverses these
> two approaches, and plays the market as an institution whose
> problematics are 'solved' by rational agents within controlled
> laboratory settings.[4] But what happens in occasions of 'irrational
> exuberance' that define bubble economies, as seen in real-estate
> speculation, dotcom-mania or the caffeine induced palpitations of day
> traders?
>
> There is undoubtedly a logic at work in such instances, but it is not
> one that conforms to rational intent. The logic of irrational
> economics is one whose particularities are immanent to the
> contingencies of the event. The experimental economics of game theory
> attempt to overcome or at least minimise contingency by designing
> markets in which the desired results come to fruition. The world is
> their laboratory. The structural adjustment programs of the World
> Bank and IMF are good examples of experimental economics in
> operation. However, the desire to see the world in their own image is
> the primary catalyst of failure for such models. Certainly, this
> point is disputable; arguably the model of structural adjustment has
> succeeded insofar as the World Bank and IMF agenda for countries in
> Africa and South America to 'leapfrog modernity' in such a way
> that bypasses European models of state formation into a neoliberal
> paradigm of governmental dependency on outsourcing to private
> providers has proven financially beneficial to foreign investors. But
> such a view is limited in scope, to say the least. The production of
> global poverty and massive disparities in wealth can hardly be rated
> a success.
>
> My proposal, then, is to see a project like OrgNets as a form of
> experimental economics that are open to the contigencies of the event
> and the social-technical and disciplinary dynamics of conflictual
> constitution. Contigencies necessitate factoring in the elusive
> dimension of experience. My interest is not to exploit economic or
> social vulnerabilities, but rather to enhance capacities and address
> trans-institutional economic realities and disciplinary foreclosure
> brought about by intellectual property regimes, internal competition
> and limits placed on research by the avalanche of adminstration.
>
> The trick with a project like OrgNets is to treat it as a symbiotic
> device that both facilitates the generation of concepts and affects
> the allocation of economic resources. The latter may take the form of
> direct funding, commissions, participant fees for summer schools, or
> in-kind support by institutional partners – e.g. office space, use
> of equipment, personnel, etc. Of course any proposal to play the
> neoliberal game of outsourcing education is going to meet the wrath
> of some leftists and activists. But it is hypocritical to dish out
> critique without offering alternatives for economic subsistence.
>
> Muniesa and Callon refer to platforms (as distinct from laboratories
> and in situ experiments): 'the platform is an intermediate
> configuration, more open to compromises with several kinds of actors
> than the laboratory' and refers to 'flexible organizational forms in
> [sic] where surprise is more a resource than a problem' for
> 'strategic innovation'. OrgNets also share these features of a
> platform – flexibility, most certainly, but the element of surprise
> is less clear for OrgNets. A genealogy of OrgNets would establish the
> connection with tactical media, reknowned for its hit-and-run
> approach to semiotic warfare. Where OrgNets corresponds with surprise
> is perhaps most clear when OrgNets is brought in to relation with
> established institutions of education and research, namely the
> university, which is characterised by a transdisciplinary deficiency
> and has a limited capacity of invention.
>
> As a collaborative anthropology of new institutional forms, the
> project investigates how the emergence of organized networks
> illuminate some of the material qualities and tensions of creative
> industries in Beijing. The project holds the precept that
> transdisciplinary urban-media research is an autonomous expressive
> capacity that subsists within a field of translocal and supranational
> structural forces. This is not to suggest a form of structural
> determination, but it is to recognise that tensions of a particular
> order are inherent to media education that refuses the stagnant
> methods and orthodox theoretical approaches that by and large
> characterise the state of play, be that in Chinese universities or
> the rest of the world.
>
>
> The Neoliberal University
>
> As government funding for higher education has diminished over the
> past decade (or longer, in some national cases), universities have
> found themselves increasingly positioned within a market economy.
> This structural relation alone locates education as a commodity
> object. Inevitably there will be barriers to access learning in such
> instances. An alternative – open access learning – has great
> merit, but there are some fundamental issues to do with cost of
> delivery (labour, production, infrastructure, etc.) and technological
> modes of communication that must be addressed. In building open
> access repositories of research findings, this project investigates
> the connection between peer-to-peer collaboration and new business
> models.
>
> The glacial temporality of university curriculum development and
> subjugation of teachers by the life-depleting demands of audit
> cultures sets a challenge for media education programs that wish to
> synchronise their curricula with the speed of popular media
> literacies. To distinguish market and user hype from quality that
> makes a substantive difference is near impossible. Consensus will not
> be found beyond the fleeting moments of micro-adoption among A-list
> bloggers and their links, or whatever other community of users you
> care to name. Ratified standards for media education within the
> cultures of networks do not exist.
>
> As the university increasingly loses its monopoly on the provision of
> knowledge as a result of neoliberal governance and the advent of peer-
> to-peer and user-producer media systems, media education is in crisis
> mode. Best practice is frequently found outside of university degree
> programs. Expertise has become distributed across a population of
> practioners and everyday users. How, then, might such knowledge feed
> back into university programs? Can formal accreditation for
> autonomous education be extended to non-university actors? Are such
> processes even desirable?
>
> Crucial here are the different temporalities afforded by research
> platforms positioned outside of the temporal order of the market and
> its post-Fordist modality of just-in-time production, which
> underscores the habitus of the university today. In a posting earlier
> this year to the edu-factory mailing list – an initiative by mostly
> young activist researchers associated with Negri's uni-nomadi (an
> informal teaching program across a network of media and social
> centres in Italy) – Taiwan based academic Jon Solomon phrases the
> predicament of time and the university as follows:
>
> 'The students have been so disempowered by the compulsory national
> primary and secondary education system (which favors the production
> of an elite) that when it comes to the university organization of
> their own temporal rythms, they are completely passive in their forms
> of resistance (and the faculty doesn't provide any relief or
> alternative resources)'.[5]
>
> How, then, to create different temporalities which enable process of
> counter-subjectivisation? A number of core elements come into play in
> the repositioning of research and teaching outside of the university.
> And these, I would add, are not without precendents: think of the
> mechanics institutes as sites of popular learning for the working
> classes in the 19th century (albeit enframed by the morally uplifting
> values of the middle-classes), adult education classes after the
> second world war, the rise of alternative schooling movements such as
> Montessori in the 60s and 70s, and so on and so forth.
>
> My point is that counter-sites of learning at the current conjuncture
> are imbued with qualities special to the social-technical dimension
> of network cultures, and conditioned by the political economy of the
> informational university.[6]
>
> As a pilot study, the counter-mapping project in Beijing provides
> inititial research data for future comparative research that examines
> the inter-relations between geopolitics (regional trade agreements,
> national and multi-lateral policies on labour mobility, security and
> migration, etc.) and the peculiarities of intraregional, translocal
> and global cultural flows within the creative industries. A
> comparative focus on the creative industries enables new questions to
> be asked about the mutually constitutive tensions between these
> forces, practices, histories and policies.
>
> The project establishes a prototype for new cross-cultural
> educational and research institutions organised about the logic of
> networks. As signalled in policy milestones such as the Bologna
> Process (1999), scholarly monographs and OECD reports, the landscape
> in higher education has been undergoing gradual, and in some
> instances rapid, transformation toward a market model.
> The Bologna Process is more complex than a simple transition toward a
> market model, but its modularization of educational processes should
> nonetheless be considered as a core dynamic of the contemporary
> second wave of globalization (services economy). This dynamic is also
> how educational changes intersect with the emergent economy of
> culture after the first wave (trade) has been nearly completed, which
> is why the Bologna Process holds important implications beyond the
> realm of education.
> The role of universities as exclusive providers of higher education
> is changing as small and medium enterprises obtain government
> accreditation for provision of 'educational services'. We are yet
> to see organisations develop out of the field of network cultures as
> providers of high quality research and teaching.
>
> Collaborative practices within the creative industries and network
> cultures are now well established as the primary mode of production
> and communication. The business models which sustain the combination
> of service labour and innovation as they are located on the margins
> of industry are less understood. Primarily comprising of 'informal
> economies' (symbolic, voluntary, word-of-mouth) and sustained
> economically by various forms of financial support (parental, small
> government funds such as the 'citizen wage' or grants,
> associations with universities) and wealth generation (e.g. the 'long
> tail'[7]), there is great scope for further development and
> understanding of new business models.[8]
>
>
> Notes:
>
> [1] http://www.re-public.gr/en/?p=201
>
> [2] http://orgnets.net
>
> [3] See Francesco Guala, 'How to Do Things with Experimental
> Economics', in Donald MacKenzie, Fabian Muniesa and Lucia Siu (eds)
> Do Economists Make Markets? On the Performativity of Economics,
> Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007, p. 131.
>
> [4] Ibid., p. 145.
>
> [5] Jon Solomon, 'Knowledege Conflicts, Self-Education and Common
> Production', posting to edu-factory mailing list, 22 April 2007,
> http://www.edu-factory.org.
>
> [6] See, for example, the recent Summit: Non-Aligned Initiatives in
> Education Culture, Berlin, 24-28 May, 2007, http://summit.kein.org.
>
> [7] Chris Anderson, 'The Long Tail', Wired 12.10 (2004), http://
> www.wired.com/wired/archive/12.10/tail.html
>
> [8] For a study of working conditions and experiences of new media
> workers in Amsterdam, see Rosalind Gill, Technobohemians or the New
> Cybertariat? New Media Work in Amsterdam a Decade after the Web,
> Network Notebooks no. 1, Amsterdam: Institute of Network Cultures,
> 2007, http://www.networkcultures.org/_uploads/17.pdf
>
>
>
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